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April 4, 2014 - Child Care Payment Update

4/4/2014

Child care providers offer a vital service for working parents and we know how critical it is for them to receive payments from the state on a regular basis. We at IDHS are taking extraordinary measures to expedite the payments that were delayed as a result of the switch to the new Child Care Management System launched on January 14, 2014, and to keep providers informed on the progress of payments. We are also working hard on correcting payment errors that have occurred in recent weeks. We continue to see progress in correcting those errors. In some cases, payments to home providers had union dues/fair share deductions calculated incorrectly. Some payments withheld too much and some payments did not withhold enough. IDHS is correcting those errors with payments that are being processed this week.

IDHS and Action for Children now have a special Hotline to call for Cook County providers who are facing financial hardship due to delayed payments. The number is 877-581-3691. The hotline is staffed by Action for Children.

Below is the text from today's message on the Child Care Payment information line:

Phone Line - (217) 524-9041

You have reached the DHS Child Care payment information line. Today is April 4th. There is lots of information on this call. So, you may want to take some notes. Please listen to this message completely! To find out when your payment was entered, you can use 800-804-3833. That number will usually tell of entered payments the working day after entry, approval of a payment the working day following the approval, and generally will tell about issue of a payment two working days after the issue. Licensed providers must enter the IVR case numbers to hear information on their payments. Please refer to the most recent child care certificate or other child care case information for the IVR number.

For this program, we draw our Federal Child Care funds in the middle of the month each month which allows us to approve and issue the majority of the payments. Some months we have still have funds from the previous month that allow us to approve some payments early in the current month. We believe we will still have some available funds for the next couple days. Some of the payments entered up to April 1st should be approved by DHS on April 4th. As funding maintains, more payments should become approved by DHS at least for the next day or two.

However, there are still payments with entry dates from February and March that have not been approved by DHS due to technical issues that require special processing. Procedures to fix the technical issues are taking longer than anticipated to process these payments. As of now, we are unable to provide an exact date when these payments will be approved. We will provide updated information as it is received.

**For issued payments, most payments approved by DHS on April 2 were issued by The Office of the Comptroller on Thursday night April 3rd. More payments should be issued at least for a couple days next week.

We realize there are some isolated problems with approved and issued payments lately that did not calculate correctly. DHS is working to identify why the problems occurred and a resolution and a reimbursement process should be arriving to you in the mail soon, or the letter can be viewed on the DHS web site.

The child care payment process is 3 Steps. Your payment is entered into the child care system, when funding is available, and the system has no errors the payment is approved by DHS. After the payment is approved, generally the payment will be issued by The Office of the Comptroller 1-3 working days after the approval. Paper checks are mailed the next working day after being issued. Direct Deposit and debit card payments are in accounts 2 working days after issue.